The whole Bo Xilai scandal has been something of an object lesson on how not to act when you're part of China's power structure, and as the focus moves to Bo's son, Bo Guagua, that becomes even clearer for the college set. Remember, folks: Don't urinate on a fence at Oxford if you want to keep driving that red Ferrari once you get to Harvard. Actually, you probably shouldn't be driving a red Ferrari either, or throwing big parties with Jackie Chan, or kissing girls. Being a child of the Communist party elite is starting to sound a lot less fun.

As The New York Times' Andrew Jacobs and Dan Levin report, Bo Guagua's hard-partying University lifestyle helped topple his politically powerful father, and now Bo Guagua himself is looking at some consequences. “If you’re discreet, they look the other way,” a former government employee told reporters Jacobs and Levin. “But Guagua’s behavior was striking... urinating against a fence at Oxford, kissing foreign girls — it all goes down bad in China.”

Bo Guagua's tendency toward the high-profile lifestyle "clearly irritated party leaders, who named the son, a 24-year-old student at Harvard, in the official statement describing the reasons for his father’s fall from power." So now Bo Guagua has few options for support back home after he was escorted from his Cambridge apartment under guard last week. Though he's unlikely to go back to China anytime soon, The Times notes. His father's been stripped of his official position, and his mother's accused of the death of family friend Neil Heywood, who got him into Britain's Harrow school in the first place, so it doesn't sound like a return would bode well for Bo Guagua.

In contrast to Bo Guagua's attention-grabbing behavior, there's Xi Mingze, "the daughter of Xi Jinping, presumed to be China’s next top leader —[who] also attends Harvard, but under an assumed name, and she does not have a Facebook account," The Times reported. Proper, but boring.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

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